Grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, Harvard Professor of History, editor of the North American Review, president of the American Historical Association, bestselling novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of the monumental History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison: Henry Adams was a self-confessed failure. We know Adams today as the quintessential critic of modern culture and as a theorist of history: an antimodernist thinker seeking a spiritual framework of meaning to combat the banality and nervousness of industrial society. To read Adams’s autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), is to view him as an all-round flop. According to the Education’s preface, Adams’s account of the multiplicity of modern life and his theory of history were inadequate; the published version of the text seemed incomplete, and marred by factual errors. Adams had already printed the Education privately in 1906, distributing to friends around 100 copies with wide margins “so that each one may correct or strike out anything unpleasant or objectionable.” But error was not so easily erased. Only two or three copies were returned, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot’s without a word. “An overrated man and a much overrated book,” Eliot reputedly commented in private, and Adams may well have agreed. He confessed that the Education was a difficult book, its difficulty marking the degree of his dissatisfaction. “The point on which the author failed to please himself, and could get no light from readers or friends,” wrote Adams in his preface, “was the usual one of literary form.”